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E-commerce Example, using a website selling ink cartridges.

Although there are only four major product lines (divided into the major printer brands - Epson, Canon, Lexmark and Hewlett-Packard), there can be a huge number of different cartridge types for each brand. A static solution would involve creating a separate web page for each cartridge number - for example www.mycartridges.com/HP/58.asp

This is the most search engine friendly and the most laborious option. If your shopping cart contains a finite number of products, then this option may be worth exploring. In the case of ink cartridges, products tend to have a relatively long lifespan, and new cartridge types are added relatively infrequently. It may therefore be feasible to produce a static page for each cartridge number. Remember that each new page presents an opportunity for a title, other tags, outbound links and some text content to be indexed. This has to be weighed up against the potential disadvantage of being seen as spam. The best way to proceed here is too look through the top ten listings for the major search terms relating to the products your selling, and to see what your rivals are doing. If you do not wish to build a static page for each product, then a single line query might run along the lines of www.my-cartridges.com/shop.asp?item=HP58 .

Note that whereas the standalone page has a much higher chance of being indexed for three separate keywords - cartridges, HP and the product itself (Cartridge Number 58), the URL above is only likely to be seen as being relevant for the keyword "cartridges". If you are using the cartridge number as your primary key, it may be worth using a hyphen to separate out the manufacturer and the product line, making www.my-cartridges.com/shop.asp?item=HP-58 .

An example of a two parameter database query might be to have the manufacturer and the cartridge number as separate entitities. A two query string might look like www.my-cartridges.com/shop.asp?printer=HP&cartridge=58 .

Note the use of the word printer as the variable, not manufacturer or any form of abbreviation (eg pri) etc. This allows your database to score for relevant keywords. The "&" symbol can confuse many spiders - this is why single parameter queries are much better. Note that the keyword "cartridge" may still gain some search engine relevance.

Another crucial aspect of database driven websites is to ensure that spiders are not brought to duplicated results. For example, the 58 cartridge result must not give the spiders the same result that they would find by following links for the HP PSC 6110 printer, even though the 58 is the correct cartridge for this model.